Apache Kafka Experts in Germany

• New development and further development of the existing MS Dynamics CRM

IT systems: Microsoft Dynamics Customer Service, SharePoint, DevOps, SAP IS-U

• CRM implementation / further development
• Taking over from the previous service provider
• Business process analysis
• Agile project organization
• Business analysis / requirements engineering with AI support
• Use of AI in development
• Analysis of master data processes
• CRM customer data management
• Requirements documentation
• Stakeholder management
• Workshop moderation

• Development of an agent-based governance platform for the automated assurance of EU AI Act compliance and ODA-compliant orchestration of AI services in complex enterprise environments.

• Design and implementation of an agent-based "Mission Control" framework (Aletheia Conductor) for autonomous state monitoring and process control.

• Development of "Compliance-as-Code" (CaC) solutions based on OPA/Rego for system-wide enforcement of regulatory guardrails.

• Integration of TM Forum ODA standards (TMF630, TMF622, TMF642) to ensure interoperability and standardization.

• Building a highly available event-driven architecture using Redpanda and CloudEvents v1.0 for near-real-time event processing.

• Implementation of an audit-proof "Evidence Chain" through cryptographic linking of trace logs in preparation for automated audits.

• Tech Stack: Java 21 (Quarkus Native), TypeScript (Next.js), Redpanda (Kafka API), CloudEvents v1.0, OPA (Open Policy Agent) & Rego, TimescaleDB, ZincSearch, Redis, TM Forum ODA, Git, GitHub, Clean Code Development, Like-C4.

Maturing their API practices on both a business and technology level. My role covers strategy, architecture, developer advocacy as well as hands-on software engineering, enabling both technical teams and business leadership to adopt and act on API-centric principles effectively. Coincidentally, we also establish GitOps, DX and platform best practices with this project.

Highlights:

• Aligning executives with the initiative by clarifying strategy, replacing misconceptions and myths with facts, clarifying the value of existing assets and enabling informed decision-making
• Formulating a way forward for API Lifecycle Management at OTTO
• Driving platform progress and fostering developer engagement by hands-on engineering work towards strategic goals

API Lifecycle Management, Team Topologies, Organizational Evolution, Regulatory, Platform Advocate, Developer Platform, Communities of Practice, Terraform, Kotlin, Kafka, Kong, WSO2, Apigee, Gravitee, Backstage, AsyncAPI, OpenAPI, API Design, AWS, React, Node.js, TypeScript, Redocly, reactive programming, CDC, Golang, Gin, GitOps, DX (developer experience), stakeholder management, roadmaps, workshops, discovery.

• Developed a browser-based platform for Kubernetes no-code deployment and cluster management
• Developed a CLI in TypeScript to deploy resources in the cluster without leaving the browser UI.
• Implemented DevSecOps pipelines: image scanning, SBOM, policy enforcement, supply-chain security, and used Kyverno. Implemented IAM integration for the command-line utility tool.
• Designed role and permission models for Keycloak, OAuth/OIDC, and social login flows.
• Used LLMs to convert user intent into diagrams.
• Worked on integration with multiple sovereign clouds like StackIT, Hetzner, CIVO, UpCloud, plus public clouds like AWS, GCP, and Azure
• The technology stack includes Java, Spring Boot, Kubernetes, OpenAI, Kubernetes multi-tenancy using vCluster, Karpenter, RBAC for CLI, Helm, React

• Technical leadership across hardware, firmware, and software teams; scope: hardware/firmware team (4 people) and leadership group (5 people)
• Consolidated and documented a product family that had grown over more than 15 years and aligned it with CRA compliance — from the bare-metal I/O module to the cloud interface.
• Provided the most important customer product with the essential requirements and architecture documentation within two months — for a firmware landscape that had grown over more than 15 years. It now supports the customer’s modernization strategy.
• Established a monthly reporting line to the supervisory board and executive board within three months: nine meetings since 12/2025. The report itself is versioned and built from the CI pipeline; it is based on automatically collected activity and release data instead of assessments.
• Built a container-based CI/CD infrastructure from scratch: cross-compilation, host tests, and documentation builds in one continuous pipeline.
• Introduced declarative QA gates for DevOps and development artifacts — from the start using lefthook instead of pre-commit, executed in a dedicated container image.

Technologies used: arc42, req42, tpo42, docToolchain, PlantUML, ArchiMate, C4 model, ADR, C, C++ (GTest), CMake, Bare Metal (ARM Cortex-M3/M7), OCI containers, Jenkins, lefthook, Prometheus, Grafana, SBOM, CRA, OPC, SCADA, PLC integration, IPv6 migration, Zero Trust, Sociocracy 3.0, Cynefin

Built an international e-commerce platform for a multi-vendor marketplace for digital assets from scratch. Designed and operated cloud native architectures at enterprise scale.

• Designed and operated a highly scalable microservice and serverless architecture
• Built the complete cloud infrastructure with Terraform + AWS CDK in AWS
• Provisioned ECS/EKS clusters (Fargate), Application Load Balancers (reverse proxy), and Lambda functions
• Observability & tracing with CloudWatch, DataDog, Prometheus, and Grafana
• End-to-end setup with DataDog (formerly AWS CloudWatch), Prometheus, and custom Grafana dashboards
• Integration of advanced metrics (including ORM mapper) and distributed tracing with Jaeger
• Robust backup and disaster recovery strategies
• RDS Postgres backups and hourly snapshots
• Read-only, asynchronously synchronized replicas with automated master failover in emergencies
• Minute-level rollback capability through versioned Docker images on ECS and Git-based CI/CD pipelines
• Created CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions for automated multi-stage deployments (Dev, Testing, Prod)
• Integrated Stripe for international payment processing
• Built a marketplace payment system with multiple parties and payout routines
• Used Algolia for high-performance real-time search of digital assets on the platform
• Federation of services with GraphQL and Hasura
• Later migration to GraphQL Mesh
• Test Driven Development (TDD) - unit, integration, and E2E testing with Jest, Vitest, and Playwright
• Used Next.js / React for modern frontend applications in the nx monorepo
• Enterprise security architecture & access control
• Integration of JWT tokens with Auth0, OAuth, OIDC, IP guards, BOLA protection, and secret vaults
• Authorization concepts with RBAC, ABAC, and native Postgres Row-Level Security (RLS)
• Built internal microfrontends with Retool for fast prototyping and operational business processes

Technologies: ABAC, AWS CDK, AWS CloudWatch, AWS ECS, AWS EKS, AWS Fargate, AWS RDS, AWS S3, Algolia, Auth0, DataDog, Docker, GitHub Actions, Grafana, GraphQL, GraphQL Mesh, Hasura, JWT, Jaeger, Java, JavaScript, Jest, Kotlin, Kubernetes, Monorepo, Next.js, OIDC, Playwright, Postgres, Postgres RLS, Prometheus, RBAC, Redis, Retool, Serverless, Stripe, Terraform, TypeScript, Vitest

• Worked as freelance Senior DevOps Consultant on-site for IBM at a European Union Agency, operating in a highly secure, air-gapped environment managing classified systems.
• Led automation and DevOps initiatives for a large-scale OpenShift platform (>400 nodes), driving deployment efficiency, GitOps adoption, and operational automation using Ansible, Python, and Bash while ensuring compliance with security requirements.
• Spearheaded automation of release and deployment workflows in a private cloud environment hosting 400+ OpenShift nodes, significantly improving deployment speed and reliability.
• Migrated existing playbooks, roles, and templates from Ansible Tower to Ansible Automation Platform (AAP), ensuring full compliance with fully-qualified collection names (FQCN) and preparing custom Execution Environments (EE) for containerized automation.
• Implemented GitOps Agent for AAP Controller Configuration as Code, enabling automated synchronization (CRUD) of Ansible Controller objects based on repository-stored configuration definitions using GitHub webhooks.
• Designed and automated complex multi-step operational workflows including environment cleanup, Helix cluster component re-creation, Kafka topic management, and OpenShift object lifecycle management across ~100 environments.
• Achieved a reduction of multi-day manual operations to under a few hours through automation improvements spanning multiple AAP clusters and OpenShift environments.
• Integrated Ansible Automation Platform with Thycotic (Delinea) Secret Server via lookup plugin to enhance secure credential management in automated processes.
• Managed deployment tasks, platform troubleshooting, and Istio network configurations while adhering to stringent EU PSC security and compliance standards.
• Collaborated with infrastructure and application teams to refine deployment procedures, develop naming conventions, and continuously improve automation coverage in an air-gapped, classified environment.

The Base Services of DB InfraGO form a central data hub between the company’s IT systems. Common Data Services are developed that distribute data from source systems to a variety of downstream systems (via JMS) and make them available (via REST API). The existing service landscape based on TIBCO is being migrated to DB InfraGO’s cloud-native platform.

• Architecture design and implementation for performance-optimized bulk data processing of several million datasets at specific times during the day
• Technical specification and documentation of business requirements
• Integration of various subsystems (including SAP and Salesforce) through the reimplementation of more than 40 microservices based on Spring Boot
• Migration of TIBCO Based microservices from the Enterprise Integration Platform to the Cloud Native Platform using Spring-Boot
• Establishment of a deployment pipeline using GitLab CI/CD, Artifactory, and automated deployment to a Kubernetes environment with the help of ArgoCD
• Definition and implementation of automated unit, integration, and regression tests

Team Size: 9

Technologies/Tools: Java, Spring Boot, ActiveMQ(JMS), JUnit, Tibco Business Works, Gitlab (CI/CD), Kubernetes (Amazon AWS), ArgoCD, postgreSQL, Oracle, Postman, Hoppscotch, openAPI, Sonarqube

• Fully on-premises LLM document-examination platform for a compliance-critical banking domain: agentic LangGraph pipeline with deterministic verification, every AI judgment structured and source-anchored; ~960 automated tests, zero data egress
• GPU throughput engineering (quantized serving, speculative decoding, prefix caching): 9.5x extraction speed-up, 500+ multi-document case files per day on a single A100
• AI-native EDI/EDIFACT integration platform (~116k LOC Java 25 / Spring Boot 4, 1,900+ tests): LLM-drafted partner mappings machine-verified before go-live (DFDL conformance, field-coverage checks, dry runs), ~99.5% byte match on real customer files — replacing weeks of manual mapping per partner

• This project involved extraction of intelligence data to support report writing for a company that provides geopolitical, global, commercial intelligence. The data have been gathered from a number of resources (interview transcripts, online data, internal documents), and then a knowledge base has been build from it. This was the basis of a complex RAG system, that was evaluated against a golden dataset. Agents have been used to find out the contradicting intelligence, the statements supporting each other, and to store back the generated knowledge.

Used: Python, RAG, LangGraph, LangChain, deepeval, MCP

• Building up the Enterprise Architecture department. Preparing the convergence of IT / OT.
• Mapping the global business application landscape (6 countries).
• Concept for a graph model of the application landscape. Storing the results in the open-source graph database Neo4J. Various reports in the database query language CYPHER and the visualization component BLOOM. Automatic generation of IT architecture diagrams.
• Development of an application taxonomy to identify redundant applications.
• Applying Gartner's Software Portfolio Management TIME model (Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, and Eliminate) for portfolio management.
• Enterprise Architecture Governance: establishing architecture guidelines for documenting measures and decisions.
• Process modeling according to Porter (Value Chain).
• Various architecture approvals for change requests and documentation in Architecture Decision Records (ADR).
• Working on the RACI matrix for various processes.
• Working on business capabilities as preparation for a LeanIX rollout.
• Contributing to the concept for IT/OT convergence.
• Establishing architecture guidelines in a very pragmatic corporate culture. Knowledge about applications and responsibilities is spread across the world.

• Modernization of a large-scale Java enterprise application*

The project is modernizing a complex enterprise application that has grown over many years. The existing Spring-based legacy system runs on Java 8, OSGi, and Eclipse RCP and is being gradually migrated to a modern, maintainable architecture with Java 25 and Quarkus.

Marcus works on analysis, architecture, refactoring, and implementation. One focus is on untangling historically grown structures and dependencies and on building a clean, sustainable Java and Quarkus technology stack.

Tools & technologies: Java 8, Java 25, Quarkus, Hibernate ORM with Panache, EclipseLink, OSGi, Eclipse RCP, Maven, JUnit, Mockito, REST, JSON, Git, Eclipse IDE, IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, Jira, Confluence

• Further development of the existing e-commerce platform based on SAP Commerce (Hybris) to meet the growing demands of digital commerce.
• Ensuring the scalability and performance of the backend, so the platform remained stable and efficient even under heavy user load.
• Development and integration of new OCC REST APIs and services for modular extensions and flexible adjustments, to implement new features quickly.
• Optimization of data flows and interfaces, which significantly improved platform efficiency and system performance.
• Ensuring a maintainable and scalable code base by using Clean Code principles, proven design patterns, and a future-proof architecture.
• Reduction of errors through extensive testing with JUnit, Mockito, and load tests with Gatling, supported by the introduction of automated test processes.
• Improved system performance through targeted refactoring measures and efficient database queries, especially to handle peak loads.
• Use of modern cloud and monitoring tools such as Kubernetes, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Grafana to ensure a stable and monitored infrastructure.
• Clear improvement in efficiency, scalability, and reliability of the platform, which now meets the demands of a dynamic and growing e-commerce market.

AI Agent SaaS

Founded and built an AI agent SaaS for automated customer support and lead qualification, including implementation with pilot customers.

• Service → product transformation: productization from the agency into an independent AI agent SaaS. The starting point was a specific customer problem; the product was developed together with the customer.
• Developed and launched AI agents for website inbound, lead qualification, and customer service, reaching €8K MRR.
• Structured and led a remote team across engineering, LLM ops, and customer enablement.
• Case PTC Auto (e-commerce on Shopify): connected an AI support agent to the store, automated product data & support workflows, reducing workload by ~10–15 hours per week per support employee.
• Set up GDPR-compliant data processing for the AI agents: data processing agreements, deletion policies, and customer data storage locations.
• Assessed agents against the EU AI Act (risk class, transparency requirements) and built them accordingly.
• Addressed customers’ compliance and security requirements (questionnaires, evidence, contracts) to make sales possible in the first place.
• Built technical safeguards into the product to prevent agent misbehavior: hallucinations, escalation to humans, and logging.